Better solutions to consumption problems

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“However this virtuousness soon dissipated once Michael Braungart – co-author of Cradle-to-Cradle – entered the spotlight. Michael’s light-hearted cynicism pointed to the fact that we are not too overpopulated at all, but rather we are just too stupid. Braungart emphasised that in our quest for sustainability all we have been doing is coming up with solutions to the problem by being to “less bad” rather than producing products and services that are actually beneficial to our environment. In Braungart’s eyes, eco-efficiency is merely a form of “guilt management”, and being “less bad” doesn’t actually make us any better. 
“Braungart doesn’t believe our current rates of gratuitous consumption need to be reduced at all—in fact, he actually views consumption as fundamentally good. If we do it in the right way, that is. He believes the fundamental flaw of today’s society actually lies in the fact that our design is “bad”. Braungart asserts that we don’t need to be reducing anything at all; we just need to be producing products that are designed to be recycled as food back into the ecosphere as “biological nutrients” or goods that can be recycled as “technical nutrients” back into the “technosphere” as new products. The emphasis here is on eco-effectiveness rather than eco-efficiency, where everything we produce gives back to the land—and rightly so. I mean (as Braungart suggested in his presentation), who really wants to be having efficient sex when effective sex is up for grabs? ”

From: idealog.co.nz/ecoinnovator/blog/sustainability-is-better-by-design

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